why the wait to travel once you have a referral?

I came across this written by a lady on one of the yahoo groups.

I was curious about the exact steps involved in processing a dossier in Vietnam, so I asked my agency for some clarification. I thought this was very helpful in explaining why it takes 4-5 months between dossier submission and travel. Here is the process (according to my agency's Vietnam coordinator):

Basically there are 4 steps.
Your dossier first goes to Hanoi - step1. After it is translated in Hanoi it is submitted to the Department of International Adoption (DIA). They look over your documents and make sure everything is current and that you have all the documents present. Then they send your dossier to the province (where the orphange is) to the justice department.

This is step 2. This is the longest step. During this step, the justice department contacts the orphanage and asks for all the childs paperwork as well. They process the child's paperwork to make sure everything is accurate that the child is really truly free for adoption etc and make sure your paperwork is all in order. When they are finished, they send it back to Hanoi to the DIA

step 3 DIA gives final approval for the child and you and then sends it one more time back to justice department

step 4 The justice department calls our representative to come in and pay the G&R (giving and receiving) fee and our G&R is set for 2 weeks from the date the fee is paid.

Unfortunately, each case can take a different amount of time. We have no idea how long each step is going to take but the 2nd step is the longest. When the paperwork is in the province at the justice department we really get NO update. However, DIA is good about calling us and giving an update about our cases when they get your paperwork back in their office.(end of excerpt)